Paul, there are 2 aspects to your question: what is displayed, and what is
stored.
Access stores dates as numbers, where the integer part represents the date,
and the fraction part the time of day (.5 = noon, .25 = 6am, etc.) The date
is therefore not stored in any format.
By default, Access displays the date to you in the format specfied under
Regional Settings in the Windows Control Panel. However, literal dates in a
SQL statement are stored/interpreted like American dates by default. You
cannot change this behavior, but you can specify a display format for a
table field (or a control on a form/report).
More information on avoiding the 3 cases where Access is likely to
misunderstand dates in dd-mm-yyyy format:
International Date Formats in Access
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-36.html